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Renaissance Household Goddesses
Abstract
During the Renaissance, Florentine patricians began to litter their homes with luxury goods, engaging in a broad pattern of consumption that has been called “display culture.” This essay addresses a curious and hitherto ignored feature of this visual and material economy: the private display of mass-produced glazed terracotta statuettes. Many of these domestic works represented important political iconographies (for example, Judith and Holofernes and David). In this essay, I focus on one iconographic strain in this genre: private representations of Donatello’s lost Dovizia, a statue erected in 1429 in the Mercato Vecchio, Florence’s ancient “forum.”
The fifteenth century embraced reproducible multiples with a concentrated zest and variety never before seen. The processes allowed for the production of objects, sometimes hundreds or thousands of them, that were largely indistinguishable from one another: plaquettes, portrait medals, engravings, printed book and type design; cartapesta and terracotta Madonna and Child sculptures, the re-emergence of small bronzes, or, slightly later, etchings, or glazed terracottas that could be assembled in any number of arrangements (not to mention earlier traditions in woodcut prints and coins). Many of the reproducible media types had proliferated for a decade or more before Gutenberg's successful machine was introduced around 1450. It would seem that some of these media, or more precisely the multiples milieu in which they emerged and thrived, facilitated the printing press's ultimate success. What do these objects reveal about the contemporaneous dynamic between art and the 'market' for art, between patron and artist, between the audience and the 'aura' of the original?
Donatello's "Dovizia", a colossal personification of Abundance that once stood atop a column in the Mercato Vecchio, Florence, was commissioned by the city c. 1428-30. The sculpture seems to have been the first Renaissance monument that truly integrated classical form and content. Its imagery depended on the symbol for the Roman state charity, the "Alimenta", instituted by Trajan and well known in the Renaissance through literary accounts, Trajan's public monuments, and coins. Like its prototype, the "Dovizia" symbolized that the state's wealth funded its charity toward the citizenry. The fact that Trajan's soul had been saved by Gregory the Great because of virtuous acts such as the foundation of this charity seems to have made the "Alimenta" imagery an acceptable model for the Christian figure of Charity. It was first used by Nicola Pisano (Baptistery Pulpit, Pisa, 1260) and continued to be a formative influence on later Italian versions of the theme.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Princeton University, 1995. Includes bibliographical references.
The Renaissance Man and His Children
- See Louis Haas
- L Haas
First Public Sculpture in the Early Renaissance Florence-Donatello’s Lost
- Masahiko Mori
Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History
- Joan Kelly
Donatello: Eine Einfihrung in sein Bilden und Denken
- Hans Kauffman
The Geography of Gender in Renaissance Italy
- Robert C Davis
- RC Davis
A Way of Looking at Women in Renaissance Florence
- See Lauro Martines
- L Martines
Donatello’s Lost Dovizia for the Mercato Vecchio: Wealth and Charity as Florentine Civic Virtues
- David G Wilkins
- DG Wilkins
First Public Sculpture in the Early Renaissance Florence-Donatello’s Lost Dovizia
- Masahiko Mori
- M Mori
On the diminution of women’s public roles see also Samuel Cohn, “Donne in piazza e donne in tribunale a Firenze nel Rinascimento
- S Cohn